Friday, November 20, 2009

This release was just passed along by a contributor and ultimately comes from an esteemed colleague (so HT to AS). The basic news is about a new MIT Press book, by Shigeru Miyagawa, Why Agree? Why Move? He examines agreement and movement data from Japanese, English and Kinkande.

Some things aren't quite clear from the release, like this:

The existence of similar structures in such otherwise disparate languages, Miyagawa asserts, provides strong evidence that all human languages have a common origin.

Common origin in human cognition, sure, but is the assertion one about monogenesis?

Chinese classifiers strike me as only marginal examples of morphosyntactic agreement: they transparently descend from a purely semantic classifier system such as we find in Burmese. In that language, the use of the 'pair/team' classifier with 'ox' or 'buffalo' is acceptable, but with 'horse' it is not. This is not a mere subcategorizational fact about the word for 'horse', but instead reflects the fact that traditionally the Burmese did not use teams of horses. Likewise 'basket of eggs' and 'basket of chickens' are fine, but 'basket of mosquitoes' is not, again for reasons that are about the real world rather than the language.

In addition, I don't believe that bei-constructions are really passive in the usual sense. Chinese verbs don't really have voice, nor is the language either accusative or ergative, morphologically speaking: context controls all. Thus "George dropped the watermelon and [George] was embarrassed" is not a sign of syntactically accusativity, nor is "George dropped the watermelon and [the watermelon] burst" a sign of syntactically ergativity: these are just the most plausible interpretations, and so they are the ones that Chinese-speakers assume.

Not necessarily. I've been at talks at MIT where there have been comments along the lines of "it's great to see that syntactic research shows that Altaic is actually a family" (because Korean and Japanese share a certain property).